


Life and Fate

by paceisthetrick



Series: Drabbles for Shells [14]
Category: No Night is Too Long (2002)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-13
Updated: 2012-05-13
Packaged: 2017-11-05 07:54:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/404080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paceisthetrick/pseuds/paceisthetrick





	Life and Fate

It was Ivo who taught me that I had the ability to make my own fate, to determine my own role in our relationship. Had I once thought of us in the simplistic terms of male/female, active/passive, dominant/submissive? He mocked me for falling victim to historical and literary canon. The ancient Greeks, he pointed out, had defined homosexual relationships as such. Surely in the year Our Lord 1995 I could produce something that if not revolutionary at least altered the paradigm.  
  
He was of course correct. In my youthful insecurity and my near-adulation of his apparent wisdom, I chose to cast myself as the passive, feminine one -- coquette to his svengali. But then he even made me question that – calling me a whore for all the women I had fucked to spite him. How very telling, he said in his deadliest tone, that I had had to take a woman to bed to wound him, that I was too bound by tradition to seek out another man. I was worse than any cliche.   
  
His derision left me smarting and when I first began to write, I was determined to emerge the new Genet, on a par with Satre’s _Saint Genet_. My pen would turn heads to tails, make every reader rethink everything they had ever thought before so that future generations would still be pondering the placement of a comma or the isolation of a sentence.   
  
Five years later, I am more realistic, wanting simply to lay to rest those memories that have bound me, dragged me down in chains to the abyss of despair.   
  
Last year, I dedicated my first book to Ivo:  
  
 _For Ivo, who has long had his doubts about the younger generation._  
  
It was only now that I realize while I owed Ivo much in its creation, I had actually written it for my mother.


End file.
